On the Quantum Mechanics of Entropic Forces

It was conjectured 30 years ago that gravity could arise from the entropic rearrangement of information. We offer a set of microscopic quantum models which realize this idea in detail. In particular, we suggest a simple mechanism by which Newton’s law of gravity arises from extremization of the free...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Daniel Carney, Manthos Karydas, Thilo Scharnhorst, Roshni Singh, Jacob M. Taylor
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2025-08-01
Series:Physical Review X
Online Access:http://doi.org/10.1103/y7sy-3by1
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Summary:It was conjectured 30 years ago that gravity could arise from the entropic rearrangement of information. We offer a set of microscopic quantum models which realize this idea in detail. In particular, we suggest a simple mechanism by which Newton’s law of gravity arises from extremization of the free energy of a collection of qubits or oscillators, rather than from the exchange of virtual quanta of a fundamental field. We give both a local and a nonlocal version of the construction and show how to distinguish a range of these entropic models from ordinary perturbative quantum gravity using existing observations and near-term experiments.
ISSN:2160-3308